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Movie Review – Jurassic World

Movie Review – Jurassic World

I had high hopes for Jurassic World. It promised from its trailers to be what I hoped to see when opening John Creighton’s original Jurassic Park novel back in 1990, three years before the first movie came out. I had hoped then that the novel would feature a fully functional densely populated theme park.

Instead, the first movie dealt with a handful of people with over-focus on two children. The new film manages to repeat that formula, leaving most of the park visitors largely ignored outside of the Pterodactyl attack. We mainly deal with a hunky velociraptor hunter, Chris Pratt, playing macho hero to the hilt by trying to be both Indiana Jones and Patrick Swayze, with a touch of Dinosaur Whisperer.

The female lead is Bryce Dallas Howard, who keeps heaving her bosom to camera as if trying to show us that she is more worthy of our attention than any dinosaurs on screen.

Of all the cast members of the previous three movies, only B D Wong, playing the geneticist who created the first movie’s monsters returns. This film really needed Sam Neill or Jeff Goldblum on board. Only Vincent D’Onfrio, as the guy out to use raptors for military purposes really stands out because viewers know he is bound to come to a bad end.

The science is extremely poor, even to the layman. This is the Dr. Pepper ads ‘What’s The Worst That Could Happen’ philosophy in action. The Indomitous Rex is just big and mean, and dominates the action. The message is that the park’s capitalist need for bigger, better and more dangerous is also the philosophy of the movie-makers. They don’t think ordinary dinosaurs can carry the story alone. What I do like is that the main dinosaurs effectively steal back their park. Raptors, T-Rex and the Mosasaurus unite to tear down the bigger, better than nature genetic monstrosity, but they leave the humans alone as they achieve it.

The human characters have little to do but run and hide a lot. Howard outruns the T-Rex she leads to its Rocky V Apollo Creed showdown with Indomitous even after the first film showed a T-Rex outrun a jeep going at 60 miles per hour. She is wearing high heels when she does it.

There are big disappointments. I wanted to see dinosaurs attack the monorail network running round the park. The futurism reminded me that this was Future-World when Jurassic Park was more like Creighton’s Westworld.

The most ludicrous touch was the gyroscopic bubble-cars the kids could ride round in independently, taking them anywhere they wanted, rather than on a set track. How was any driver not going to get lost or roll right down a dino-throat with those? Similarly, guests are allowed to row boats down the rapids unaccompanied in dinosaur infested areas.